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I know tools like Puppet and Chef really shine when you have 'a lot' of servers that you need to handle, but from my humble experience (only with Chef) they can
by gog 15y ago
I know tools like Puppet and Chef really shine when you have 'a lot' of servers that you need to handle, but from my humble experience (only with Chef) they can also make things more complicated then they should be if you are not a heavy user.
I am not deploying Ruby applications so I really don't like the idea of installing a bunch of software on my production servers. Not to mention that chef also installed a compiler on my server and that is a big no-no in my book.
Am I the only one that has an aversion of using these tools?
- alnayyir 15y agoI avoid unnecessary complication but wrapping your head around infrastructural complexity is part of being a programmer.
- uriel 15y agoYou are not alone, I'm also very reticent to adding yet one more complex tool into my systems when a few simple and clean shell scripts can do the job.
- cparedes 15y agoI see where you're coming from - however, the great thing about CM tools is that they abstract a lot of the weird differences between UNIX's and Linux distributions. Defining a user in Puppet or Chef will create that user the same way, whether it's in RHEL, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc. Puppet is also more lightweight than Chef in terms of the amount of dependencies it requires, given an already existing installation of Ruby (in fact, I think there's only one dependency: facter.) The only problem is that it comes with a lot less available language features out of the box than Chef, mainly because Puppet doesn't have a way to store and serve configurations of other machines out of the box without something backing the data store, like MySQL or CouchDB.